The
Holocaust Industry, Reflections on the Exploitation of
Jewish Suffering, is published by Verso on 20 July.

The Holocaust Industry:
Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish
Suffering

by Victor Sebestyen

Doctor
Norman Finkelstein, a humanities professor at
Columbia University in New York, claims some Jewish leaders
are exploiting the Holocaust and peddling deliberate lies
about Nazi atrocities.

He argues that the pursuit of reparations from Swiss
banks and German industrialists for survivors of the death
camps is "an outright extortion racket" which will result in
an increase of anti-semitism in Europe and America; that the
majority of people who claim to have survived the
concentration camps are fakes, and that it is time to call a
halt to building new Holocaust memorials and museums, such
as the exhibition opened by the Queen at the Imperial War
Museum last month.

But his most controversial challenge to world
Jewry is an attack on the article of faith held by
Jews and gentiles throughout the West -- that the
Holocaust was a unique event that cannot be
compared with anything else in history. This
belief, argues Finkelstein, which few people dare
to challenge, is ruthlessly being used by Jews to
justify Israel's appalling human rights record and
create an environment of fear where nobody, either
in academia or politics, can discuss the Holocaust
honestly and rationally.

If
David Irving had made these claims, he might have
found himself once again appearing in the Royal
Courts of Justice. .
.

Only a Jew could have written this book and
found a reputable publisher for it. Only a Jew could have
been brave enough to call it The Holocaust Industry, a title
which in itself will cause offence. If David Irving
had made these claims, he might have found himself once
again appearing in the Royal Courts of Justice; the leader
of US Muslims Louis Farrakhan would have been placed
by American public opinion even further beyond the pale and
if Jörg Haider had spoken like this, he would
have ensured yet harsher EU sanctions against Austria.

Yet it is hard to level against Finkelstein one of the
vilest charges that can be made against anybody in a liberal
democracy: Holocaust denial. His father and mother were
survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and Nazi death camps and all
the rest of their family were exterminated at Treblinka. He
is a product of the Holocaust, which, he claims, is why he
is battling against its use "not to remember Jewish
martyrdom, but for the purposes of Jewish
aggrandizement".

Finkelstein's tone is often angry and scathing. Sometimes
he over-states his case or uses language so far removed from
normal academic discourse that some might be tempted to
doubt his credentials. But he deserves to be heard, and not
only because of his background. He is making some profound
points that many younger and more thoughtful Jews have
quietly been attempting to debate, but whose voices have
been stilled by the establishment, particularly in the
US.

History Lessons The Holocaust, he argues, was
barely mentioned in America, or anywhere outside the Jewish
State, for the first two decades after the war, when
memories were freshest. "I do not remember the Nazi
Holocaust ever intruding on my childhood. The main reason
for this was that no one outside my family seemed to care
about what happened," he says.

It was only after the Six-Day War in 1967 that the
Holocaust "industry" began to boom. "I sometimes think that
the worst thing that ever happened to the Nazi Holocaust was
that American Jewry discovered it."

This "discovery", insists Finkelstein, had nothing to do
with fear for the survival of Israel, which after all had
spectacularly smashed its enemies in under a week and
occupied land along its borders seven times its own
size.

The
Holocaust was "reinvented" mainly to underpin US strategic
interests. Israel became America's surrogate in the
Middle-East and the Holocaust was used to justify the
alliance and, later, Israel's policy towards its Arab
neighbours.

"The Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable
ideological weapon. Through its deployment, one of the
world's most formidable powers, with a horrendous human
rights record, has cast itself as a 'victim state' and the
most influential 'ethnic group' in the US has likewise
acquired victim status.

"Considerable dividends accrue from this specious
victimhood -- in particular immunity to criticism, however
justified. Those enjoying this immunity have not escaped the
moral corruptions that typically attend it."

Holocaust ideology It was the US Jewish elite
which turned the Nazi holocaust into the Holocaust. Here
Finkelstein enters his most controversial waters and treads
on the most tender sensibilities. Jewish leaders, led by
people such as Simon
Wiesenthal, above left, and
Elie Wiesel, argue that the Nazi extermination of the
Jews was a unique event -- and uniquely irrational. Wiesel,
for example, has maintained that it is a "religious mystery
" unknowable and inexplicable. That, Finkelstein claims
viciously, doesn't stop Wiesel charging a standard $25,000
plus a chauffeur-driven car on the lecture circuit in an
attempt to explain it.

So
entrenched is the belief in the uniqueness of Hitler's
crimes against the Jews that even to challenge it, according
to some powerful academics such
as Deborah Lipstadt, right,
-- victor over David Irving in the libel
courts -- amounts to Holocaust denial. Yet the conviction is
itself irrational, argues Finkelstein. No historical event
is unique. And, dangerously, it leads to myth-making and
distortion.

The uniqueness claim also gives Jews an undeserved
"sovereignty over suffering" and Hitler a place in
demonology categorically different from Stalin, Mao Tse
Tung or Pol Pot. This political correctness has
become so extreme on some campuses that to compare the Nazi
death camps with an atrocity such as the slaughter of 10
million Africans in the Congo as a result of the Belgian
ivory and rubber trade, is met with accusations of Holocaust
denial.

The "industry" has built dozens of Holocaust
memorials and museums throughout the world, yet
there isn't one to the handicapped victims of
Nazism. A higher proportion of Europe's gipsies
than Jews were slaughtered claims Finkelstein, and
there's no memorial to them. Washington DC has a
big Holocaust museum, but nothing for victims of
the slave trade or of the genocide against American
Indians.

I
sometimes think that the worst thing that ever
happened to the Nazi Holocaust was that American
Jewry discovered
it.

Holocaust Fraud Among the reams of schlock
(Finkelstein's word) in Holocaust literature, there are lies
-- most notoriously Benjamin Wilkomirski's book
Partings, written in the Seventies, which became a huge
best-seller and a vital text in the "industry". Wilkomirski
claimed to have been a child survivor of Auschwitz,
when in fact he isn't Jewish and spent the war growing up
quietly in Switzerland.

Thousands of others falsely claim
to be survivors of death camps, claims Finkelstein.
There
were, he says, about 100,000 when war ended, and about a
quarter died within two months. Yet the "industry" has
claimed that since the early Nineties, 10,000 have been
dying a month. "It would mean there were eight million in
1945, but there were only seven million Jews in
German-occupied Europe before the war."

Blood Money Finkelstein is most scathing about
the business end of the industry. "The current campaign...to
extort money from Europe in the name of 'needy Holocaust
victims' has shrunk the moral stature of their martyrdom to
that of a Monte Carlo casino," he writes. Switzerland and
Germany were the target of a "shakedown". After a 15-year
battle, the Swiss banks last year agreed to pay more than
$200million in compensation for "blood money" allegedly
looted from Jewish Holocaust victims before and during the
last war. The figure, he argues, was far less than the $7
billion to $20 billion victims had claimed in a series of
court actions and probably five times higher than was
actually due.

Finkelstein says little of the money will ever be seen by
victims; like much of the $12billion compensation paid by
Germany over the past 50 years, Jewish organisations will
use it to open more museums and set up more departments of
Holocaust studies at universities.

In the US, maintains Finkelstein, the Holocaust is
"taught" at schools and colleges in far greater depth than
the Civil War, the defining moment of US history. The
pursuit now of compensation from former Eastern bloc
countries such as Poland shows the "industry" has "gone
berserk". It could fuel antisemitism that already shows
dangerous signs of increasing.

Finkelstein concludes: "The challenge today is to restore
the Holocaust as a rational subject of inquiry. Only then
can we really learn from it. The abnormality of the Nazi
Holocaust springs not from the event itself but from the
exploitative industry that has grown around it. The noblest
gesture for those who perished is to preserve their memory,
learn from their suffering and let them, finally, rest in
peace."

It's a stirring call. But peace is the last thing that
will break out among Jewry with the publication of this
book.

On Finkelstein's book "The Holocaust Industry", what a
cheerfully racist admission of guilt Mr L.
Horenstein's letter (of 13 July) boasts to his inferior
gentile readers of the Evening Standard. It will make the
perfect addendum quote hopefully for future reprints of
Norman Finkelstein's brave new book. To those who
missed it , here it is again:

"Gentiles dare not do anything for fear of upsetting
us. We are aware of this and rejoice in it and milk it for
what it's worth."